Adventures in Figma and the Power of Spite

Hey y’all, welcome back. Week two of making an active effort to be more creative led to some very interesting results! This week I focused on trying to add some basic design to the site within the Astra theme editor and using Figma to create a logo. Admittedly, this is a hastily written piece, but hey! That’s why this site is called Oscar Scribbles, and definitely NOT because I was looking for synonyms for the word “writes.”

This is what Oscar Scribbles looked like at the beginning of the week, and what you’re seeing now is the end result of this week, obviously… Anyways, there’s plenty more work to be done to refine how I want this thing to look, but there’s plenty more weeks left in the world (probably) so I’ll keep tinkering as I go.

Eventually, I’ll have enough articles on here to get some cool side-menu stuff going, like this:

But as things are right now, that would be completely pointless. I will also note that the WordPress’s customization is pretty restrictive, and makes me want to just full on build a site instead of using WordPress, but I’m going to keep learning how to use it and adjust.

So, let’s talk about the logo: I don’t know man.

The overall idea was to make something simple and direct, so I landed on “me thinking some kind of thought bubble” and now I think it kinda just looks like the design for an app. My process involved watching a tutorial on basic controls of Figma, which is a design app made more for user experience/user interface stuff on websites, but I’m trying to make things as complicated as possible so I’m trying graphic design within it. According to people on Reddit it’s just as viable as using Canva or Photoshop. Here’s my progression real quick:

So here’s the final product! It’s got stars in the thought bubble for some reason. I like stars I guess, or maybe I added them there because every performative male’s favorite movie is Interstellar, who knows?

I will definitely be changing it up a little bit, and am also open to some suggestions for fine-tuning in the comments if you guys have any!

Now let’s talk about something I think is actually ruining our lives: AI.

Sorry, not sorry, but I hate the way AI is utilized and has been shoved down our throats for every possible use case. No, I actually don’t need an AI assistant to help me take notes, that literally goes against the main idea of taking notes!!! I couldn’t even find a stock photo for this because I was afraid it was just going to be AI slop! It sucks!!!

Anyways, at work there is a new initiative that is requiring the use of AI to speed up workflow. I voiced my discomfort with that idea and because I’m extremely headstrong, I decided to try to find a way around it.

Now, I can’t actually show any pictures or explain what it does in exact detail, but the gist is that I instead did research by myself which eventually led me to a formula I could use within Excel to execute the exact function that the stupid AI was doing (in way more steps.)

The only problem is it didn’t format exactly correctly. HOWEVER, I learned something about Excel, which is what this is all about! That’s exciting! Furthermore, it inspired me to keep going after this issue. I’m gonna keep coming back to it until it’s solved, because that’s the power of the human spirit. Or I’ll give up, because that is also the power of the human spirit. Either way, at least it’ll be human.